"COP30 will be our last chance to avoid an irreversible rupture in the climate system"
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil and Chair of COP30
Astrid Nilsson Lewis, climate inequality policy advisor at Oxfam Sweden and lead author of the report ‘Climate Equality: A planet for the 99%’, spoke at the 2025 Responsible Science conference and here outlines the latest findings on climate, inequality and the problem with billionaires on a heating planet.
Article from Responsible Science journal, no. 8 (April 2026).
Oxfam’s latest climate and inequality report made global headlines ahead of COP 30, in Belém, Brazil, in late 2025. Using the latest data on the emissions of the super-rich developed together with the Stockholm Environment Institute, the report set out, in stark terms, that it is the world’s richest individuals, wherever they live, who are most culpable for the looming climate disaster.
COP 30 came ten years after world leaders agreed in Paris to take urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Governments since have failed to decarbonise their economies rapidly, and it is now almost inevitable that humanity will overshoot the Paris agreement. The immediate consequences are visible in catastrophes like Hurricane Melissa, which was yet another devastating weather event intensified by human-caused climate change.
Oxfam’s research, the fifth report in their climate and inequality series, updated the emissions inequality data behind the famous ‘champagne glass’. The picture painted in numbers of climate and inequality is stark. In 2023 the richest 10% of people were responsible for 48% of emissions, while the poorest 50% accounted for only 8%. The report explores how the super-rich utilise their economic and political power to lock the world into climate disaster.
Exceeding the global carbon budget
The world is passing terrifying milestones. In 2024, average global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. The same year, two-thirds of the Earth’s surface experienced record temperatures and fossil-fuel emissions reached their highest-ever levels. The evidence that we are facing imminent and irreversible climate breakdown is now damning.
The remaining safe carbon budget now is almost depleted. The best available climate science shows that at the current rate of emissions, there are just two years of available carbon budget remaining.
Exceeding the carbon budget means global warming will rise above 1.5°C. This fact shouldn’t stop the world from acting out of despair, even when we do exceed 1.5°C, every subsequent fraction of a degree of heating makes a huge difference.
How billionaires burn through the budget
In identifying the core of the problem, it is clearer than ever that the super-rich are burning through our climate budget with luxury emissions. A person in the top 0.1% emits more in a day than a person in the poorest 50% emits all year.
Billionaires dominate every aspect of the global economy, controlling 17 of the 50 largest listed corporations in the world, either as CEO or principal investor. Oxfam’s research uncovered the investment portfolios of 308 billionaires. It found that in 2024, the investment emissions of the 308 billionaires totalled 586 million tonnes of CO2e, more than the combined emissions of 118 countries; if they were personified as a country, then they would rank as the fifteenth-most polluting country in the world, ahead of South Africa.
On average, a billionaire’s annual per capita investment emissions are 1.9 million tonnes of CO2e, which is 346,000 times more than the average person. Each of these billionaires would have to circumnavigate the world almost 10,000 times in their private jets to emit this much.
Two-thirds of the corporations they invest in are not aligned with the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target, and one-third have decarbonisation plans aligned to a 4°C world. Also they tend to invest in much more polluting corporations than average. For every $1m invested, billionaire investments produce over two and a half times more emissions than the S&P 1,200 list of companies. Almost 60% of the billionaire investments are classified as being in high climate-impact sectors, such as mining or oil and gas companies, compared to 49% for the S&P 1,200, and 14% of their wealth is from corporates with fossil-fuel revenue, compared to 9% for the S&P 1,200 – a 55% higher share.
What does this mean for climate policy?
The climate and inequality crises are inextricably linked. The same ideologies and power dynamics that are fuelling inequality are allowing corporations and their rich owners to avoid regulation and to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels in the name of profit.
Policies to combat the climate crisis must take into account the responsibilities of the richest people. COP 30 in Belém, Brazil was the stage for the intense climate negotiations needed to resolve action and accountability. Thousands of corporate lobbyists attempted to stall meaningful progress on a fair transition away from fossil fuels, while developed countries are blocking progress on climate finance—including the vital funds needed for adaptation.
But there were reasons for hope such as the Belém Action Mechanism proposal for a just transition that protects workers’ rights and ensures equity and justice are at the heart of the fossil fuel phaseout. It seeks to guarantee that workers and communities—especially in the poorest parts of the world—are not left behind. Countries representing 80% of the world’s population have already signalled their support.
Indigenous communities from Brazil, Latin America, and across the globe, alongside civil society allies, demonstrated the power of people marching for justice. They demanded urgent action to protect our planet’s future and voicing their anger at governments and fossil fuel industries that continue to block progress.
Corporate tactics to block action
In fact COP 30 was riddled with lobbyists. They outnumbered all delegations except Brazil; 1 in 25 attendees was a fossil fuel lobbyist, research from the Kick Big Polluters Out found out. An Oxfam investigation with the Guardian found that one in four billionaires at COP 28 made their fortunes in highly polluting industries such as oil, gas, mining or chemicals.
The problem was not just lobbying, however, but a kind of litigation terrorism by the super-rich. Investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are being widely used by the rich to hold back climate action. ISDSs are established in many investment treaties and allow corporations to sue countries that harm their profits by introducing new rules. They are typically brought against low- and middle-income countries by rich corporations and individuals. $120bn of public money was won by corporations in ISDS courts, with $84bn going to fossil-fuel corporates and $7.8bn to mining corporates.
Corporate-sponsored misinformation is also used heavily to block action and slow transition. Fossil fuel corporations have been found to adopt the same tactics as the tobacco industry, spending millions on networks of advocacy organisations spreading climate disinformation. The Koch brothers, who made their fortune in the fossil-fuel industry, gave over $145m to 90 organisations that attack climate science and policy solutions from 1997 to 2018. In France, billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin was reported to be investing €150m to bolster the far right, while the CNews network was bought by far-right fossil-fuel billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who rebranded it as the French equivalent of Fox News. The channel was fined €80,000 in 2024 for broadcasting climate misinformation.
Financing hate and social division also appears to have become a tool to promote fossil-fuel interests. In 2018, donations to anti-climate change action groups totalled $808m, with family foundations providing significant amounts of these donations. Wealthy donors are also secretly funding far-right and white supremacist movements, which spread racism, anti-transgender and misogynistic views, and are more likely to support politicians with regressive climate agendas.
Are wealthy individuals, many of whom have fossil-fuel interests, using hatred to build support for poisonous politicians whom they can count on to introduce anti-climate policies?
An inequality crisis
Meanwhile, whatever is happening in private behind the scenes of global climate politics, the rich are very publicly ripping through the carbon budget – if everyone emitted like the 0.1%, it would be gone in 3 weeks - to stay within safe limits, they’d need to cut their emissions by 99%. And while billionaires can build bunkers to protect themselves from the consequences, the most vulnerable in the world are hit the hardest. The climate crisis is an inequality crisis.
The report is a powerful reminder that it is not just rich countries but rich people everywhere who bear the responsibility for fuelling today’s dangerous levels of global warming. The majority of the super-rich live in the Global North, but ultra-wealthy people in poorer nations are also culpable. For example, someone in the richest 0.1% in Nepal, a country with a very low share of historic emissions, emits eight times more than someone in the poorest 50% in the UK.
One of the most shocking findings is that the share of emissions is increasing for the rich, who can most easily reduce their emissions, and decreasing amongst the world’s poorest people. In other words it is the wrong group who are cutting their share of emissions. Since 1990, the richest 0.1% have increased their share of total emissions by 32%, whilst the poorest half of humanity has actually seen their share of emissions fall by 3%.
Billionaires could, of course, direct their investments towards less climate-damaging corporations. If they instead chose an investment fund which prioritises good environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, they could cut their emissions by 23 times.
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This is an edited version of two articles that first appeared on the blog Equals.
Read the full report here (available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and the summary in Arabic). The workings behind the stats can be found in the methodology note here.
Image credit: A flooded residential area by Pok Rie via Pexels.
